‘The Second Emancipation’ by Howard W. French

On 6 March 1957 the British colony of the Gold Coast ceased to exist and Kwame Nkrumah became the first prime minister of Ghana. It was an unprecedented moment: Nkrumah was the first leader across sub-Saharan Africa to wrest power from colonial rule and form an independent state. For Nkrumah it was just the beginning: ‘Our independence is meaningless unless it is linked up with the total liberation of the African continent’, he announced at the independence ceremony.

This declaration of Pan-Africanism was a heralding of the ideology for which Nkrumah would gain great renown. He was not its father, of course, nor has Pan-Africanism a clear and direct lineage. If anyone may be considered its patriarch, then it is the American sociologist and civil rights activist W.E.B. Du Bois, whose writings brought the movement onto the world stage and who took a leading role in the First Pan-African Conference, held in London in 1900. It was a significant moment, then, when Du Bois first met Nkrumah in 1945 at the fifth Pan-African Congress in Manchester.

Emerging from the Second World War, when the veneer of European colonial hegemony throughout its empires had cracked, the great swell of a far older fight for freedom rose to meet Pan-African ideals from across the Atlantic. The ways in which citizen rights in the United States came to be intimately linked to the end of imperial domination of Africans by Europeans is a major theme of Howard W. French’s The Second Emancipation. ‘Few remember’, French writes, ‘how freedom for Africans was accompanied by and indeed became deeply entangled with the conquest by African Americans of their full political rights’. French explores this entwinement through the life of Nkrumah to ‘illuminate his age – a time of extraordinary possibility for Africa and for Black people the world over’. Nkrumah is the centre of gravity to which French always returns as he weaves wider narratives. He gives biographical treatment to many of those in Nkrumah’s orbit, or he in theirs. It is a cast of many, including visionary thinkers, writers, activists, and fellow pioneers of Pan-Africanism such as Edward Wilmot Blyden, Marcus Garvey, J.E. Casely Hayford, C.L.R. James, and George Padmore.

The result is something of an ideological, intellectual, and political family tree, for which it could be said that Pan-Africanism or global Blackness – and not Nkrumah himself – is the trunk, as it were. This is well illustrated by a key incident recounted in the book, which occurred seven months after Ghana gained independence from Britain. Independence was a watershed moment for African – and Black – liberation movements, so much so that Martin Luther King had travelled to the new nation’s capital, Accra, to attend the ceremony in person. Also there was then-vice president Richard Nixon, and King told him: ‘I want you to come visit us down in Alabama where we are seeking the same kind of freedom the Gold Coast is celebrating.’ (A photograph of King and Nixon’s meeting in Accra was considered too incendiary to publish in the US.) But while Ghanaians had won their freedom in Ghana, they, too, still met the colour bar in the US. So it was that in October 1957 the Ghanaian finance minister, Komla Gbedemah, found himself driving between New York and Washington, D.C. on an official programme. Stopping to buy orange juice at a highway restaurant in Delaware, Gbedemah and his aide were told that they must take their drinks outside. Citing the earlier visit by Nixon to Ghana, Gbedemah seethed: ‘If the vice president of the US can have a meal in my house, then I cannot understand why I must receive this treatment at a roadside restaurant in America.’

This global asymmetry meant that segregation was not simply between racial binaries, but also between Black people themselves. French cites the conventional wisdom that Brazil was the last ‘major country’ to abolish slavery in 1888, but contends that decolonisation in Africa and the Caribbean ‘should be understood as the true end of slavery’. It is this which reveals the second emancipation of the title. The formal end of slavery in the US in 1865 was only the first emancipation from which further waves of violent and oppressive subjugation followed. French writes, then, of successive movements from the 1930s to 1960s which pushed for full freedom and citizens’ rights for Black Americans. These, he deftly demonstrates, both coincided with and contributed to the drive for freedom from colonisation in Africa. Unlike other African leaders such as Kenya’s Jomo Kenyatta, who studied in London, Nkrumah deliberately chose to study at Lincoln University in the US, arriving in Philadelphia in 1935. He came to know the African American world and its cultural and political centre, Harlem. There, many began to see opportunities for Black Americans outside the US. Africa had long been an ideational destination, but the Back to Africa movement and resettlement to Liberia in the 19th century were mostly ‘top down’ initiatives, often driven by white Americans, whereas the 20th century saw more of a ‘bottom up’ mobilisation, not necessarily because Black Americans did not want to stay in the US, but because they were drawn to anywhere with greater prospects for freedom. In the 1950s Ghana presented a specific future in which racial subjugation was the past.

By pulling these stories together, French reassesses Nkrumah’s political trajectory against the true canvas upon which it developed: not only Ghana’s own struggle for independence, nor even calls for full liberation across colonial Africa, but also the civil rights struggle. This sense of connectedness is palpable as we find Nkrumah sharing stages with Malcolm X and Adam Clayton Powell, Jr. in both Harlem and Accra. In many ways, French has written a sequel to his acclaimed 2021 book, Born in Blackness: Africa, Africans, and the Making of the Modern World, 1471 to the Second World War. It is an important work that deserves to be widely read. 

• The Second Emancipation: Nkrumah, Pan-Africanism, and Global Blackness at High Tide
  Howard W. French
  W.W. Norton, 512pp, £29.99
  Buy from bookshop.org (affiliate link)

Jonathan M. Jackson is a research associate at the University of Oxford.